My egg seems to be cracking, but I haven't the faintest clue as to what I will find inside. What a year it's been. It reads like a sad, sad country song: lost my job, lost my house, lost my dogs, lost my business, went to jail somewhere in the midst of all that (I think that was last year - maybe not)...
Yet it somehow seems that in the process of it all I have begun to find myself. I am sober for the first time in my life which none of us ever thought would happen... I am discovering what I do and don't want. I am learning that the people I call friends are anything but. I am at long last feeling the sensation of standing on my own beach with the sand between my toes. The sun is shining down and I am not leaning on anyone or anything but myself.
But now what? I don't know what the next step is - and I have even less of a clue as to how to put one foot in front of the other to get there. I am not, however, worried. It will come.
I have becoming (am becoming?) a much quieter person. Not to say that I do not go about hooting and hollering and howling at the moon any longer, but more so that my spirit seems to have quieted. I don't feel the need to back up, break into a full sprint and run headlong into the proverbial dead end wall any longer. It now seems so pointless. Instead I begin the climb - brick by brick - to carry myself over that wall and out of this rut I have been in for so long that it feels as comfortable as my bed.
The difficulty of leaving such comforts though DOES however give me pause and threatens to trouble me. It's then that the what-ifs set in. What if I can't...? What if I don't...? What if I might...? What if I will...? What if I DO SUCCEED?
I seem to sabotage myself in my own successes... It's like that old song "The Southern Cross" - "And we never failed to fail. It was the easiest thing to do..." But the next line is what is egging me on - "You will survive being busted..."
Survival. Success. Redemption. Renaissance.
I only hope that when my shell does bust open that I, too, am stained with all the colours and cracks of the journey that brought me here. I have faith that I will be. I have hope that, one day, the inside will match the outside - in all it's stained, cracked, and colourful glory. And as for all the other lost oddities that I have forgotten about along the way - those too will be reclaimed, polished and worn like a badge of honour.
